build or buy??

[jay1012002]

Hi all,

I am looking to either build a system or buy one for my kids but dont know which way to go??

I dont mind if its amd or intel. (prefer Dual Core either way though)
They want vista home premium
Will play games (Sim 2 so far)

Budget is £500 for everything including monitor.

If build any idea's what to get?
If buy again any idea's??

any help would be appriciated

Thanx jay1012002

 

[JohnLynn]

With the budget of £500 or so, i recommend to buy. But I am not sure most XP games will be compatible with Vista. I had a lot of problems with iTunes 7 and Nero Burning to run on Vista. Anyhow, to buy off-the-shelf, Vista is the only way. XP will be phased out rather soon.

To build one from scratch, you should consider the retail price of Vista. Home Basic is crap. Premium OK. LCD 15" £100+.

Check out the retail price of Vista before you build. Whatever Vista version you buy, I don't recommend vista upgrade. The reason being, it's not fresh install and I don't believe MS can transfer all your settings without any glitch.

So set aside £200 in the kitty and you are left with £300 for the rig. If you can comprimise for low-end AGP card. One advantage here is taht you could have a SATA drive which is a great deal for gamers. Practically twice as fast as IDE drives.

To buy the ready-made, most branded PCs, these days, come with 1 GB RAM, reasonable capacity of HDD (80 - 120 GB). Choose the cpu you want. I personally like AMD for gaming. You can't find many AMD build-up though.

On the other hand, the ready-made pc usually come with cheap crap graphic cards. Even without considering 3D games, you require minimum 128 MB, 400 MHz GPU (Nvidia/ATI) to run Aero smoothly. I've got ATI 9550. Vista runs ok but i haven't try war of the worldcraft. SIM should be fine. then again I am not sure the compatibility with Vista.

So.. I would say.. £500 is not enough to build but quite a budget to buy.

See what other members think.

 

[Swansen]

well i know you could builder a competent system for about 600. Basic PCIe board, AMD X2 42000+ A gig maybe two of ram, and then a 7600 gt so start. Then like a 20 dollar optical drive and 50 dollar hard drive. Other than that, see if you can find a used system.